Though he is well-known for film roles such as Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music,” or Rudyard Kipling in “The Man Who Would Be King,” Plummer got his start in the theater. His very first acting gig was in high school in Canada, when he played Mr. Darcy in a stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” — a role he described as “a conceited, wonderfully arrogant young man.” Plummer said at the time, he thought he was the biggest star in the world. Critics came to the school play and gave him solid reviews. “I actually had no research to do,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I was already arrogant (laughs).”

He then did radio up in Montreal, in both English and French. Radio was a great training ground, he said, and it forced him to have at least 20 voices on tap – different voices to play different characters. “That was when radio was tops,” Plummer said. “So it gave one a great training for changing your voice or getting accents.” (Interestingly, in his coming film, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” Plummer and the actors speak English with a Swedish accent.)

Over the past six decades, Plummer has played numerous stage roles. He is noted for being a fine Shakespearean actor, and has played everyone from Iago to King Lear to Julius Caesar. As for his dream role, he said, “I’ve played most of them already, and some of them twice.” But there was one screen role that got away: Henry II in “Becket.” Plummer had played the stage role with the Royal Shakespeare in the U.K. to great acclaim – he won the London Evening Standard award for Best Actor in 1961. When it came time to cast the film adaptation, he said he was determined to get the part. “Then my old friend Peter O’Toole got it instead, the son of a gun,” he said.

His film roles have become increasingly more interesting as time has passed. In the past year, Plummer has appeared as Hal in “Beginners,” for which he has just received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Supporting Actor. He also brought his Tony Award-winning Broadway role as John Barrymore to the screen in “Barrymore,” which played at the Toronto International Film Festival. Later this month, he’ll appear in David Fincher’s highly anticipated film, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” as Henrik Vanger, the patriarch of the extended Vanger family.

But Plummer will always do theater. “Nothing can replace a live audience,” he said. “That’s been the case for 3,000 years.”

According to him, the public’s regard for theater has changed, and this has had a lamentable effect on not only the acting profession, but on young people’s appreciation for the arts. “I grew up in an era where the theater was still absolutely revered and the cinema and the theater complemented each other,” he said. “Now, the theater – it’s there and always will be there, of course, but the movies and the video games and all the other ancillary kind of success industries, as it were, have all got together and kind of obliterated what we’re all about. That’s sad because the theater is the place for language and when language is sort of ignored, then there’s not much hope for any kind of esoteric or artistic life.”

Plummer pointed to Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton. “That is the highest we can go, the theater, because for an actor, he is spouting words of all the greatest writers of all time, and they wrote for the theater,” he said.

For his current stage project, Plummer has been working on a one-man show, “A Word or Two.” It is an autobiographical journey through literary works that have influenced him since childhood. In the past, he has performed a brief version of the show at charity fundraisers. He has since lengthened it and added more substance, he said, and he will perform it at the 2012 Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. “I get a chance to play all sorts of different creatures from the books and then narrate through that my story as I go,” he said. He hopes that after Stratford, the show will move on to New York for a limited run.

Meanwhile, he’s busy promoting this year’s films, particularly as he is being nominated for accolades for his performance in “Beginners.” As busy as he is, at age 82, Plummer shows no signs of stopping. “There’s no such thing as retirement,” he said. “This is a hobby as well as a profession, you know? It’s a fascinating world and never boring.” He brought up the late English actor, John Gielgud, who died in 2000 at the age of 96. “He was looking marvelous, straight as a ramrod, seemed to have just as much energy as he had before,” Plummer said of Gielgud. “No, no, I’m determined to pass John (laughs). I want to get to 97 at least.”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.